Salos’a looked down at her. The god’s eyes were round circles of light. The god’s feathers frayed out into blinding fire. “There is another boundary you must cross,” said the owl. And then the god let her go.
She cried, “Not again!” She fell: into light, a blare of horns, a shattering ringing of bells, hoarse cheering voices, fragments of speech, torn shreds of blue and red and then an eye-burning white. She was falling, tumbling through light, through brittle air and wide spaces. She saw faces, stones, a glittering cloud, the round, blinding face of the sun.
She stared at it, until a hand covered her eyes, and a beloved, racked voice said, “You’ll go blind that way.”
“No,” she breathed. “No!” she cried in despair. More words would not come.
Voices spoke, but the words shattered into fragments. There was no pattern, no meaning, no possibility of understanding.
Zanja felt a dizzying, tilting sensation. Blinding light again, followed by impenetrable shadow. Hands gripped her clothing, voices filled her ears. She cried, “Gods—how could you—have I not served you?”
“Shaftal,” a blurry voice said, “Oh, blessed day!”
Something heavy enwrapped her: a comforting warmth, and then the sensation of being held, rocked, the voice, less blurry now, saying roughly, “Zanja, Zanja na’Tarwein, oh my sister . . .”
She heard a heartbeat. She felt the rise and fall of a ragged breath. Who was calling that familiar name? “Emil?” she said in disbelief. “Is everyone dead?”
The shadow that blocked the blinding light bowed over her. “No one is dead,” said Emil.
“Karis is dead.”
“No.”
“I heard her voice.”
“You heard her living voice with your living ears.”
“What,” she said in bewilderment.
“Look over there. Do you see that wall?”
She peered in the glare of light. She saw stones letting go of each other and falling in a happy tumble. “Not a wall,” she said. “Rubble.”
“Well, it was the wall of Watfield garrison. And look over there.”
She turned her head, and saw a proud, rigid woman in Paladin’s black, taking the hand of a younger, tireder, prouder woman in Sainnite gray.
“Mabin?” said Zanja.
“And Clement, General of Sainnites.”
“Oh. Oh, Emil!”
Now the confusion of voices began to sort itself out: Norina, scolding as usual, Medric, making a rather plaintive speech on the difficulties of getting desperately-needed assistance, and then Karis’s distinct raw voice, saying, “Just take one step forward so I can reach you.”
Zanja peered into the haze of light and watched Karis pluck the spectacles from Medric’s nose, spit on the lenses, and wipe them clean on the tail of her shirt. She examined them critically in the sunlight, then put the spectacles back on Medric’s face. He blinked at her. Then, he looked down at Zanja and cried with vivid joy, “It’s you!”
Zanja felt the confusion beginning to claim her again. She did not feel certain Medric’s assertion was correct. Medric dropped to his knees in the snow, and grabbed one of her hands in his. “Emil, she’s awfully cold.”
“Karis, can you ask Clement if there’s a place indoors, by a fire, where we can go?”
Karis looked down at them. She seemed terribly far away. Someone was energetically beating a cloud of dirt and snow from her red coat. She turned away.
Medric said giddily, “Zanja, have you heard? This is the thirteenth day of the first year of Karis G’deon! And we have a truce!”
Emil’s voice rumbled in his chest, a warm vibration against Zanja’s ear. “So many people will not forgive us for this peace. Peace without justice, they’ll say, is not peace at all. And those Death-and-Life people, just because Willis is dead—”
Zanja mumbled into the scratchy warmth of his shoulder, “Enough worrying.”
Medric snorted with amusement. “Just try to make him stop!”
“Norina is glaring at me,” Emil said.
“No doubt she thinks Shaftal’s councilor should do official sorts of things, rather than sit like a weeping lump in the snow with his best friend in his arms. Look, here comes J’han. He’ll want to take a good look at Zanja. Oh, and I hope you’re ready—though I’m sure you’re not—for Leeba.”
Leeba careened into them. Zanja tried to put her arms around her, but it was impossible to hold her. Might as well try to embrace a windstorm. My life! she thought in astonishment. And it fell on her, with all its weight and wonder, and no matter how she tried to grasp it, it eluded her, and yet it was hers.
“Little Hurricane,” she cried, “I missed you!”
Chapter 39
Herme’s company had taken it upon themselves to clear out the large room that was serving them as sleeping quarters. By the time Clement arrived, the room was not only clean, but furnished with chairs, tables, even a threadbare carpet and hastily polished lamps. Unsettled dust was still swirling in the lamplight, and a fire, nursed by two attentive soldiers, burned briskly on the hearth. The soldiers that had been clustered around Clement had been dispersed by a crisp storm of commands, and now she was alone, with—astonishingly—nothing to do.
Weak-kneed, shivering with what she hoped was merely cold, she collapsed into a chair.
By a feat of soldier’s magic, Herme instantly appeared before her. “General, what are your orders?”
She wanted to tell him to stop calling her “general.” But she dared not disturb the illusion—it was an illusion, wasn’t it?—that seemed to be held together by words alone. So she said to Herme, “Captain, please inform your company of my gratitude for their quick action.”’
“Yes, general.”
“We’ll be wanting a lot of hot tea.”
“That’s on its way, general.”
“Tell Commander Ellid I want to speak with her.”
“Yes, general.”
“That is all.”
He saluted, and disappeared. Almost immediately, a soldier snapped open the door to admit Ellid, in a wash of cold air.
“Your soldiers are making quite a show of themselves,” Clement told her. Managing to look gratified, Ellid reported that more than half the wall had fallen, and that it continued to fall. The front gate now lay flat on its face. Watfielders were walking across it to deliver basket after basket of hot bread, fresh butter, and sweet jam.
Unable to bring herself to be concerned about the wall, or the gate, Clement said weakly, “Hot bread?”
Ellid grabbed a soldier. “Get some of that bread in here for the general.”
“What’s delaying our guests?” Clement asked.
Ellid gave a wry grin. “Better guests than conquerors, eh? The G’deon’s people wanted her to show herself to the Watfielders. You can hear them cheering out there. The local Paladin commander just strolled brazenly in, and the two Paladin generals are briefing him before he goes off with my people to discuss details of the truce here. I’ve told them to produce a proposal by noon and it’s coming direct to me and you. I assume you’ll want to use it as a model for the other garrisons. Do you want me in here, general, or out there?”
“Out there. Visible. Very visible.”
“Yes, general. What else?”
“Has someone gone to fetch Gilly?”
“Yes, but you know it takes time to get that man out of bed. And I’ve told the company clerk to get some sleep, because he’ll be up writing orders all night. And you had better talk to the Paladin generals about security for our messengers to the other garrisons.”
“Right,” Clement said, in a daze of exhaustion.
Ellid looked gravely down at her. “You sure managed to look like you knew what you were doing out there.”
“You know bloody well it was a blind charge.”
“That’s a secret between you and me, general. The soldiers think you’re some kind of magician who pulled a truce out of the teeth of disaster. And th
at’s exactly what they need to be thinking.”
“Oh, hell,” Clement said. “You mean I have to continue this pretense?”
Ellid’s grin was more than half a grimace. The door opened, and this time the cold air smelled like a bakery. A crowd of people, some soldiers and some not, carried in the storyteller, with the little girl riding behind on her father’s shoulders, crying imperiously at them to be careful, and vehemently waving a painted lizard in the air.
A soldier deposited a glorious basket of marvelous bread in Clement’s lap. Ellid said, “My lost cook gave me a distracted greeting, and promises that soup, meat, pies, and other fine foods are soon to follow the bread. If you want to make an old woman happy, you’ll think of a way to make him a soldier again!”
She left to look after the garrison.
Clement breathed in the scent of the bread. She picked up a round loaf, and the warmth was almost painful on her numbed fingers. She tore off a piece, and the crust shattered, and the interior let out a cloud of exquisite steam. At last, she took a bite, and let out a small moan. The cold fled from her flesh, but the pain revived: face, shoulder, hip, muscle. She had been smashed, bruised, broken, depleted, and worn out by these momentous days and nights, and it seemed only right that this should be the case.
She forced herself to stand up and walked over to the one person in the room whose condition was worse than hers. The storyteller had been deposited on the hearth, with a much worn coat over her shoulders, and the red-cheeked little girl tucked under her arm. The child noticed Clement’s approach and said with hostility, “It’s another one of those soldiers.”
The storyteller slowly looked up at Clement. Her dark skin had turned gray with cold; her lips blue. Her muscles were still spasming with shivers. Apparently, the cold of the unheated gaol had nearly killed her before the execution squad even arrived. Clement squatted down beside her, knees cracking, muscles quivering. She proffered the basket. “Warm bread?”
The storyteller said, “Do you truly think I will break bread with you?”
Clement instinctively jerked back, lost her tenuous balance, and nearly dropped the basket in the effort to catch herself. Even the man who was unstrapping the woman’s boots looked shocked. “Zanja—!”
“Why are you so mad?” the little girl asked nervously.
Clement set the bread basket securely on the floor. “Zanja na’Tarwein?”
As the woman glared, the man said politely, “Yes, general, she has been restored.”
So this was the one Clement had feared: who had survived a skull fracture, a broken back, torture, and imprisonment; who had emerged from a valley populated by corpses determined to exterminate the killers of her people; who had suborned both the Sainnite Medric and the Paladin Emil; who had not merely found the Lost G’deon but had won her love; and who had finally sundered her very soul . . . all for the sake of—revenge?
“I’ll just leave the basket here,” Clement said. Feeling truly battered, she gathered herself to rise, but simply could not do it.
“General, you’re hurt! Let me help you,” said the man.
Zanja said, “No, J’han.”
“It is not right—”
“Brother healer, heed me!”
Apparently perceiving something that Clement could not, the man sat back on his heels, restraining his reflexive kindness with an obvious effort. Less than a year ago, a person of his generosity and knowledge had taught the Sainnites how to save themselves from the plague. Perhaps it had in fact been this very man. Unfortunately, not all Shaftali were like him.
When Clement looked at the silent warrior, she looked into the other face of Shaftal: unbowed, unforgiving. Every attempt to overcome the people had not merely increased their resentment, but also their ability to resist. Clement’s acts, and the actions of all the soldiers like her, had created this unrelenting enemy, and all the enemies like her. With a great deal of effort they could be killed, but they could not be eliminated.
“What do you want from me?” Clement asked, in Sainnese.
The warrior replied in the same language. “You took no risk when you put yourself at the G’deon’s mercy. Karis is so fearful of doing harm that she has repeatedly refused to act at all. You had good reason to expect only generosity.”
Clement protested, “My desire for peace is sincere! Ask that Truthken—”
“If you misrepresented your intentions in her presence you would not be alive now. But sincerity is not enough.” Zanja na’Tarwein was speaking with an effort, yet her words were like the storyteller’s: precise, and devastating.
Clement urgently wished that she could get away from her. But she could not. “What would be enough?” she asked. “If I offered you as many soldiers to kill as we killed in your village—”
“It would not be enough.”
“If I had the power to undo the past—”
“You could not help but undo the marvelous along with the despicable.”
The weight of those words, the horror of them, felt unendurable. Clement’s eyes were burning—a general does not weep! Yet she spoke, inadequately, words that broke even as she uttered them. “What my people did to yours was despicable. I am sorry—desperately sorry.”
There was a silence. The warrior took a breath, and looked away, as though she also were fighting tears. Suddenly, she did not seem terrible at all. She said, “The valley of my people is populated by nothing but bones. The memories of their deaths will haunt me until the day of my own death. But your sorrow—like my sorrow—is not enough.”
“Then nothing can be enough.”
The katrim looked at her. “If that is true, then lasting peace is impossible. Nothing has been gained today.”
Dread replaced the last remains of Clement’s relief as she realized how truly Zanja na’Tarwein had spoken. So many people had been wronged, over so many years! Somehow, reparations must be made, or the peace of words would never become a peace of fact. Yet Clement had nothing to offer Shaftal. Nothing.
Surely seven thousand Sainnite soldiers was not nothing!
As sometimes happens in extreme exhaustion, Clement felt a hallucinatory clarity. She understood exactly what must be done.
She said, “If my people become Shaftali, would that be enough?”
The last survivor of the Ashawala’i people turned her harshly beautiful, starkly alien face to her. “You will offer them to Shaftal?”
Every stupidity of the last thirty-five years had come from the Sainnites’ unwillingness and inability to change. Certainly they had not been welcomed, permitted, or encouraged to belong in Shaftal. But neither had they tried to be anything other than conquerors. To attempt it now might be so difficult it verged on the impossible, and might take the rest of Clement’s life to achieve. But wasn’t her only other option to take Cadmar’s well-trodden road, a coward’s way of self-induced oblivion and obstinacy, to delude her people with visions of heroism as she marched them to destruction?
Clement said, half to herself, “I must do better than merely preserve the past. For I have a son.” She looked up at Zanja. “So even if I fail at everything else, I will offer myself to Shaftal. And though I fear I won’t live long enough to see this promise fulfilled, I’ll do all I can to transform my seven thousand soldiers, as well.”
And then Clement felt sick with disorientation—giddy, grief-struck, light-headed—and the man had leapt up to steady her, to help her get securely seated on the floor, to bow her head between her knees until the nauseating dizziness had lifted. When her ears had stopped roaring and the cloud of her vision had cleared, Clement cautiously lifted her head.
“I am satisfied,” said Zanja. Her spasms of shivering had eased. The little girl was saying to her irritably, “You talk funny! Why are you doing that?” The man spoke soothingly to the child as he returned to his examination of Zanja’s feet. “You Ashawala’i are a sturdy folk,” he commented.
Zanja reached for one of the loaves of bread and tore i
t in half. She said to the child, in Shaftalese, “I have been speaking with General Clement in the soldiers’ language, Little Hurricane. Look—here is some jam in this basket. Do you want some on your bread?”
With the restless child successfully distracted by bread and jam, Zanja gave Clement a serious look. “I will eat with you now,” she said, and handed Clement the remains of the loaf. With the crisp crunching softly in her teeth she added, “I am a crosser of boundaries . . .”
It sounded so like the storyteller’s opening ritual words, I am a collector of tales, that Clement rubbed her face in bafflement.
“To cross is my calling—my curse—”
“Your gift!” protested the healer.
Zanja smiled wryly. “That also. And my joy.”
“I thought your curse was telling stories,” said Clement.
“The storyteller is gone,” said the healer. “Zanja doesn’t even remember her.”
“Medric says the storyteller was killed—that she had asked to be killed. She must have known that she had completed her task.” Zanja brushed breadcrumbs from the fine wool clothing. Clement watched her knife-scarred hand in dazed fascination. Did this woman not remember doing up those silver buttons? Did she not know how she came to be in Watfield garrison? Did she remember none of the stories she had been told? She seemed remarkably composed for a person who had awakened to find the walls falling down around her.
A crosser of boundaries, Clement thought, might be accustomed to such abrupt and inexplicable transitions—accustomed enough that she could mask her disorientation as effectively as Clement could mask her fear.
Zanja glanced at Clement, still smiling wryly. “Even to my kinfolk I always seemed peculiar,” she said. “But I might be a useful friend to you, general.”
Earth Logic Page 43